A brief entry on online leftist disputes: the Longyan deception case (plagiariasm by Zhihu left swindlers / theory for sale) (notes at the end)
[The story of a dispute between Weimingzi and Zuoyi23 was covered in a previous entry: BREAKING: Chinese online left ruptures as Weimingzi launches broadside against Zuoyi23 and disciples in hourlong rant precipitated by denial of Hegel (Bilibili theory vloggers vs. Zhihu left-liberals). Perhaps it deserved an update, but, having checked in from time to time, I never thought I could wring more than a couple hundred words out of the continuing contention over theory and practice. You can read it for a feel of the online left landscape and the sort of characters that call it home, first of all, and it also ties indirectly back into the case I’m about to cover.]
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REPORT: LONGYAN DECEPTION CASE
Over the past year or so, a Zhihu poster called Longyan, marked only by a profile picture of Yakov Sverdlov, made a name for himself with lengthy essays on Marxism, political economy, and world history. He was indefatigable, often posting sprawling pieces several days in a row. An erudite, coherent explication of Zhdanovism would be followed by, say, an appraisal of People’s Liberation Army bandit suppression strategy, or a discussion of humanist ethics under late capitalism. He gained a substantial following in the world of the Zhihu left.
He began to build a community for himself beyond Zhihu, forming groups on WeChat and QQ. He told his fans conflicting stories about his background. He was twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight. He was a laborer, and then he was a grassroots cadre, and then it he got a job as a social services employee after a factory accident. Whatever version of the story he shared, he was invariably down on his luck. Small donations came in to keep him going. He supplemented the smaller donations with membership fees for his private tutoring sessions in Marxist theory.
It was around then that his followers began to turn against him.
There had always been skeptics. Online sleuths had begun to dig up evidence of plagiarism. Longyan’s essays were often not much more than retitled selections from leftist websites. He would snip and modify things slightly, and try to add his own tone to the additions, but entire paragraphs went in untouched. It wasn’t long before supporters started noticing unauthorized lifts in the study material. They were paying to read essays from the fusty Maoist outlet Utopia. It was all a scam.
Many transgressions are excusable in parasocial relationships with anonymous internet posters, but the unpardonable sin is not delivering value for the money.
He began refunding the money.
I am taking all of these details from a detailed narrative posted on Zhihu by a group of supporters that convinced Longyan to also grant access to his account. That was part of the deal, too.
The account posted an apology from Longyan himself, too. He admitted that he got his start in plagiarism on a forum for a Japanese anime series called A Certain Magical Index. He began by translating material from English and posting it there. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted to build a following for himself. He started taking material from the forum and Zhihu to post on Bilibili. In August of 2020, he got caught and went underground, peddling self-help essays in QQ groups. He stumbled on the leftists. They were good marks. They had sympathy for him. They gave him money.
It closes on a promise to accept reformation and mutual supervision, to find a job, and live a decent life. He doesn’t say what was true about his life story and what wasn’t.
He doesn’t say whether or not he believed in any of it. Most people concluded that he was a serial swindler that knew the basics of Marxism as well as any high school student.
A heavy-handed essay posted to Zhihu concluded this way:
The “Longyan deception incident”cannot shake our views on and confidence in Marxism. On the contrary, it will strengthen them. It is just as Lenin said, that the dialectics of history are such that the theoretical victory of Marxism will compel its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists.
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X: Whatever minuscule measure of notoriety that I have earned on the internet, I can tell you that it was only in service of earning a living. It had to be under my own name. I could never do it, myself, but I have some respect for people who build a following under an anonymous identity. It can’t be motivated by profit. I don’t think the subject in this case was motivated by profit, either. The full extent of his deception remains to be uncovered, but the amounts discussed by his supporters don’t go above a few thousand dollars. I don’t understand the motivation, myself. It has to be a thirst for notoriety, even if it anonymous, and for some degree of power over the crowd.
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Y: All of this fed back into the theory vs. practice ignited by Weimingzi a few months ago. Theory, at least in this case, appeared to be nothing more than a product to be consumed, disconnected from political action. The young leftists that post to Zhihu are mostly in their early- to mid-twenties or younger, and they long for some kind of offline political opportunity. This is the reality that online radicals must face: without organization beyond the internet, their politics don’t exist. They are only consumers. Holding to the Maoist line that practice is what produces theory, they are stuck, unable even to produce original work for each other to consume, and forced to adapt and rearrange existing texts. Outright plagiarism and hustling must be punished severely because it looks very close to the practices that define their online life.
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Z: I usually use the term “online left,” but it’s much too broad. “Social media left” is more appropriate, but still not sufficient. I am starting to come around to applying “otaku left” to this group of twentysomething online leftists, whether on Zhihu or Bilibili. There is something to that. They are not merely leftists that happen to be devoted anime fans, but bring the same obsessive logic of cataloguing and snobbishness to particular strains in left-wing philosophy. For the otaku, consumption is identity. That seems accurate here, too.
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